Lassiter 2005

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C u r r e n t A n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 46, Number 1, February 2005 2005 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2005/4601-0004$10.00

CollaborativeEthnography andPublic Anthropology

by Luke Eric Lassiter

Collaborative ethnographythe collaboration of researchers andsubjects in the production of ethnographic textsoffers us apowerful way to engage the public with anthropology. As one ofmany academic/applied approaches, contemporary collaborativeethnography stems from a well-established historical tradition ofcollaboratively produced texts that are often overlooked. Femi-nist and postmodernist efforts to recenter ethnography along dia-logical lines further contextualize this historically situated col-laborative practice. The goals of collaborative ethnography (bothhistorical and contemporary) are now powerfully converging withthose of a public anthropology that pulls together academic andapplied anthropology in an effort to serve humankind more di-rectly and more immediately.

l u k e e r i c l a s s i t e r is Associate Professor of Anthropologyat Ball State University, currently on leave and teaching at theUniversity of North Carolina, Greensboro (his mailing address:2633 Walker Ave., Greensboro, NC 27403, U.S.A. [[email protected]]). Born in 1968, he was educated at RadfordUniversity (B.S., 1990) and the University of North Carolina atChapel Hill (Ph.D., 1995). He has conducted fieldwork in the Ki-owa community of southwestern Oklahoma and the AfricanAmerican community of Muncie, Indiana, and has published ThePower of Kiowa Song: A Collaborative Ethnography (Tucson:University of Arizona Press, 1998); with Ralph Kotay and ClydeEllis, The Jesus Road: Kiowas, Christianity, and Indian Hymns(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); with Hurley Good-all, Elizabeth Campbell, Michelle Natasya Johnson, and others,The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncies AfricanAmerican Community (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004); andThe Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, in press). The present paper was sub-mitted 19 vi 03 and accepted 10 vi 04.

While sustaining our fundamentals, probing thedeep mysteries of the human species and the humansoul, we must press outward, mobilizing our workand ourselves to make a difference beyond the disci-pline and the academy.

james l . peacock

In his often cited essay The Future of Anthropology,James L. Peacock (1997:9) set forth three possibilities foranthropology in the coming century: extinction,hanging on as [a] living dead, or a flourishing redi-rection of our field into a prominent position in society.Focusing on this latter scenario, he argued that we mustdirect our efforts toward a renewed emphasis on anthro-pologys relevance to wider publics.

Peacocks essay marked a revitalization of earlier dis-ciplinary conversations about how to make a differencebeyond the discipline and the academy. As anthropol-ogists had in the 1960s and 1970s, we once again debatedhow to bridge theory and practice and craft a more ac-tivist and engaged anthropology. Indeed, Peacocks threescenarios for anthropologys future echoed the threestrategies proposed by Dell Hymes in Reinventing An-thropology (1969:3948) almost three decades earlier: toretrench (i.e., to reduce anthropology to the study of pre-history, the primitive), to let go (i.e., to be absorbedby other disciplines), or to relax (i.e., to reconsider an-thropologys organization and to reconfigure its trajec-tories). The issue is not between general anthropologyand fragmentation, wrote Hymes (p. 47), but betweena bureaucratic general anthropology, whose latent func-tion is the protection of academic comfort and privilege,and a personal general anthropology, whose function isthe advancement of knowledge and the welfare ofmankind.

Many anthropologists, past and present, have an-swered the challenge to redirect and reinvent anthro-pology along such lines as those articulated by Hymes,Peacock, and others (see, e.g., Sanday 1976). Some, how-ever, have met these arguments with ambivalence. Inparticular, many applied anthropologists have wonderedif such invention and reinvention is even necessary giventhe continuing vigor of its applied dimension. MerrillSinger (2000), for example, contends that the latest ac-ademic effort to invent a public anthropology is more areiteration of hierarchical divisions between academicand applied anthropologists than a more broadly con-ceived proactive anthropology. The avenue for ap-proaching these goals, writes Singer (p. 7), is throughstrengthening, valuing and more fully integrating ap-plied/practicing anthropology, rather than inventing newlabels that usurp the role of public work long played byan already existing sector of our discipline.

Singer is right. A perusal of past and recent issues ofHuman Organization or Practicing Anthropology willquickly put to rest any doubt that anthropologists areactively engaged in the public domain both as practi-tioners and as theoreticians. But Peacock, Hymes, andthe many others who have written about redirecting andreinventing anthropology are also right. Paradoxically,

84 F current anthropology Volume 46, Number 1, February 2005

the redirection of anthropology is still important for thevery reasons put forth by Singer: anthropologistspar-ticularly academic anthropologistscontinue to strugglewith reconciling anthropologys applied, public, and ac-tivist roots with the disciplines elite positioning in theacademy. Such a castelike assumption, writes Hymes(2002:xxiii), ill befits a field that claims to oppose in-equality. We teach against prejudice on the basis of race,language, and culture. Despite our praise of fieldwork,have we preserved an unspoken prejudice in favor of our-selves as literati?

To be sure, the crux of the problem is primarily aca-demic (Basch et al. 1999:320). After all, we train bothfuture academic anthropologists and future applied an-thropologists in the halls of academe (cf. Basch et al.1999). Yet the larger problem remains the integration oftheory and practice, research and training, the joining ofacademic and applied anthropologists, uninhibited by he-gemony, in a common project, and the engagement ofanthropologists with wider publics within and outsideof academia (cf. Hill 2000). As Peggy Sanday (1998) sug-gests, merging anthropology with public currents ismore than a focus for research; it is a paradigm for learn-ing, teaching, research, action, and practice within thefield of anthropology.

Robert Borofsky (2002) suggests that this larger projectaffirms our responsibility, as scholars and citizens, tomeaningfully contribute to communities beyond theacademyboth local and globalthat make the study ofanthropology possible. Anthropologists such as PhilipBourgois (1995), Paul Farmer (1999), Laura Nader (2001),and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2000), as well as a host ofothers (see, e.g., MacClancy 2002), have provided com-pelling cases for what this public anthropology shouldlook like. From human rights to violence, from the traf-ficking of body parts to the illegal drug trade, from prob-lem solving to policy making, from the global to the localand back again, the issues informing this evolving projectto merge anthropology with public currents have provendiverse and multifaceted.

An important component of this (re)emergent publicanthropology is a heightened (re)focus on collaborationwith the publics with which we work (cf. Moses 2004).Collaboration has of course long been an important partof the applied and public work of anthropologists (see,e.g., Stull and Schensul 1987), and activist and appliedresearch strategies such as participatory action researchhave long recognized a responsibility to publics outsidethe academy (see, e.g., Kemmis and McTaggart 2000). Allthe same, however, collaborative research with researchsubjects is only recently entering onto anthropologyscenter stage as a necessary condition of both applied andacademic work. We no longer just choose to engage incollaborative research with our subjects; collaboration isincreasingly conditioning not only our advocacy but ourso-called pure research as well. In the wake of the recentTierney affair, for example, the American Anthropolog-ical Associations (2002) El Dorado Task Force singledout collaboration as follows:

The El Dorado Task Force insists that the anthropol-ogy of indigenous peoples and related communitiesmust move toward collaborative models, in whichanthropological research is not merely combinedwith advocacy, but inherently advocative in that re-search is, from its outset, aimed at material, sym-bolic, and political benefits for the research popula-tion, as its members have helped to define these. . . .Collaborative research involves the side-by-sidework of all parties in a mutually beneficial researchprogram. All parties are equal partners in the enter-prise, participating in the development of the re-search design and in other major aspects of the pro-gram as well, working together toward a commongoal. Collaborative research involves more thangiving back in the form of advocacy and attentionto social needs. Only in the collaborative model isthere a full give and take, where at every step of theresearch knowledge and expertise is shared. In col-laborative research, the local community will defineits needs, and will seek experts both within andwithout to develop research programs and actionplans. In the process of undertaking research onsuch community-defined needs, outside researchersmay very well encounter knowledge that is of inter-est to anthropological theory. However, attention tosuch interests, or publication about them, must it-self be developed within the collaborative frame-work, and may have to be set aside if they are not ofequal concern to all the collaborators. In collabora-tive research, local experts work side by side withoutside researchers, with a fully dialogic exchange ofknowledge (that would not, of course, preclude con-ventional forms of training).

While some anthropologists were quick to dismiss thetask forces recommendations (see, e.g., Gross and Platt-ner 2002), its call to pull advocacy and research into thesame stream nonetheless marked a widening agreementamong anthropologists that collaborative research is avaluable approach to human understanding.

This essay focuses on one component of the largereffort in collaborative researchcollaborative ethnog-raphy, defined here as the collaboration of researchersand subjects in the production of ethnographic texts,both fieldwork and writing.1 In previous essays I havesought to illustrate that while ethnographic fieldwork is,by definition, collaborative, collaborative ethnographyextends fieldwork collaboration more systematicallyinto the writing of the actual ethnography (see Lassiter1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004a, b; Lassiter et al.2002, 2004). In this essay, however, I wish to establisha simple, more epistemological point: that collaborativeethnography, as one of many academic/applied ap-proaches, offers us a powerful way to engage the public

1. I develop these themes in much greater detail in a forthcomingbook (Lassiter 2005), parts of which appear here with the permissionof the University of Chicago Press. I thank the anonymous review-ers who patiently provided insightful comments and suggestionsfor improving this essay.

lass iter Collaborative Ethnography F 85

with anthropology one field project, one ethnographictext at a time. In what follows I suggest, first, that con-temporary collaborative ethnographic efforts stem froma well-established historical tradition of collaborativelyproduced texts that, as founded in part on activist tra-jectories, are often overlooked in our current discussionsof collaborative research; second, that feminist and post-modernist efforts to recenter ethnography along dialog-ical lines further contextualize this historically situatedcollaborative practice; and, third, that the goals of col-laborative ethnography (both historical and contempo-rary) are now powerfully converging with those of a pub-lic anthropology that pulls together academic andapplied anthropology in a common effort to serve hu-mankind more directly and more immediately.

Precedents for a Collaborative Ethnography

The co-production of ethnographic texts has a long his-tory in anthropology. Historians of anthropology haveelaborated a number of important collaborations be-tween ethnographers and their interlocutors in the fieldsdevelopmental yearscollaborations that built upon andextended the collaborative requisite of fieldwork into thecollaborative writing of ethnographic texts. The well-known collaborations between Franz Boas and GeorgeHunt immediately come to mind (see, e.g., Boas andHunt 1895; cf. Berman 1996). So do the collaborationsbetween the French anthropologist/missionary MauriceLeenhardt and the natives of New Caledonia (see Clifford1982), Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas (see Red-field and Villa Rojas 1934), Sol Tax and Santiago Yach(see Tax 1979), H. Russell Bernard and Jesus Salinas Ped-raza (see Bernard and Pedraza 1989), and a host of othercollaborative projects carried out throughout the twen-tieth century (see Sanjek 1993). What I have in mindhere, however, is to elaborate a stream of collaborativelyinspired works that preceded and followed these better-known projects and have gone mostly unnoticed by con-temporary ethnographers: those of the earliest Ameri-canist tradition, in which American anthropologists andtheir Native American collaborators together coresearch-ed and, in some cases, coconceived and cowrote theirtexts. While I agree with George E. Marcus and MichaelM. J. Fischer (1986:viii) that American anthropologysstill resonating experimental moment, which centers di-alogue and collaboration in both ethnographic fieldworkand writing, reflects a historical development in whichanthropology in the United States seems to be synthe-sizing the three national traditions of British, French,and American anthropology, I also agree with Regna Dar-nell (2001) that among the strongest precedents for col-laborative practice emerged within the Americanisttradition.

The development of American anthropology was in-timately tied to the study of American Indians (see, e.g.,Mead and Bunzel 1960). Americanist ethnography con-sequently developed in close collaboration with Amer-ican Indian people (cf. Bruner 1986). Indeed, one cannot

consider the development of collaboration as a centralcomponent of Americanist ethnography without ac-knowledging how American Indian collaborators helpedshapeat times as active participantsthe earliest eth-nographic descriptions of Native America (Liberty1978a). It is noteworthy, then, that what is often con-sidered as the first true ethnography of American In-dians (Tooker 1978:19)Lewis Henry Morgans Leagueof the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)makes ex-plicit reference to the collaboration that engendered itswriting. Its dedication reads: To Ha-sa-no-an-da (Ely S.Parker), A Seneca Indian, This Work, The Materials ofWhich Are the Fruit of our Joint Researches, Is Inscribed:In Acknowledgment of the Obligations, and in Testi-mony of the Friendship of the Author. Morgan (1851:xi) echoes this dedication in the books preface, writingthat Parkers intelligence, and accurate knowledge ofthe institutions of his forefathers, have made his friendlyservices a peculiar privilege.

As Morgan so clearly acknowledged, the League wouldhave taken a very different form without Ely Parkersactive participation. A lawyer by training, Morgan orig-inally became interested in the Iroquois because of hisinvolvement in the Grand Order of the Iroquois, a secretfraternal order organized by him and friends in Aurora,New York, and patterned after Iroquois cultural and po-litical institutions. In an effort to found the order onrationalism and authenticity (in contrast to earlier mensorganizations, such as the American Tammany societies,which were based more on fictional representations ofIndians), Morgan turned to scientific investigation of Na-tive American peoples. Collaboration with Indians wascrucial for authenticating this new scientific investiga-tion and, in turn, the Order (see Deloria 1998: 7194).When Morgan met Ely Parker in a bookstore in the early1840s, he immediately took the opportunity to involveParker in his scientific work, and Parker enthusiasticallyagreed (Tooker 1978).

Parker initially facilitated Morgans access to Iroquoisleaders, serving as an interpreter, but over time he cameto provide firsthand knowledge and help organize inter-views on the Tonawanda Reservation (see Fenton 1962).As Elisabeth Tooker (1978:23) writes:

All the evidence indicates this was a collaboration.. . . that Parker was not only Morgans interpreterbut also provided him with information as he knewit and, when he did not know it, inquired of knowl-edgeable people at Tonawanda, a task made rela-tively easy for him by his personal and family con-nections. . . . The collaboration proved advantageousto both; Morgan not only called on Parker for infor-mation and other aid, asking him to attend meetingsof the Order, but also Parker called on Morgan forhelp, such as asking him to come to Washington inthe spring of 1846 to testify on Iroquois politicalorganization.

While Parker eventually went on to join the UnionArmy, serve as General Ulysses S. Grants military sec-


retary, and become Grants Commissioner of Indian Af-fairs (Tooker 1978), his collaboration with Morgan servedas a significant impetus for Morgans subsequent writ-ings on American Indians in general (see, e.g., Morgan1871) and on the Iroquois in particular (see, e.g., Morgan1858), in which he continued to encourage a kinderfeeling towards the Indian, founded upon a truer knowl-edge of his civil and domestic institutions, and of hiscapabilities for future elevation (Morgan 1851:ix).

Morgan went on to focus on broader theories of kinshipand evolution which, of course, had an enormous impacton the development of American anthropology (cf.Tooker 1992), but his first ethnography should not beunderestimated. Not only was it characterized as thebest general book on the Iroquois long after its firstpublication (see Fenton 1962:v) but it helped shape theway Americanist ethnographersin direct contact andcollaboration with Indiansapproached the salvaging ofIndian cultures as a scientific undertaking (cf. Hallowell2002 [1960]:3843). Major John Wesley Powell, the foun-der of the Bureau of American Ethnology, later wrote thatMorgans League was the first scientific account of anIndian tribe ever given to the world (1880:115), and hisappreciation of it was more than just a passing thing.Morgan deeply influenced Powells thinking; indeed, hiswritings (esp. Morgan 1877) helped to establish the Bu-reau of American Ethnology (BAE) within an evolution-ary framework (see Baker 1998:3845; Hinsley 1981:11343). His collaborative approach with Parker inLeague, however, influenced the way Americanist eth-nographers went about describing (and salvaging) NativeAmerica. With the bureaus establishment, Americanethnography as a scientific genre was systematized, andso was collaboration with Native American informants.Consequently, the direct involvement of these nativecollaboratorsmany of whom also became BAE ethnol-ogistspowerfully authorized the work undertaken bythe bureau in many of the same ways that authenticatedthe League and Morgans Grand Order of the Iroquois.

But the story is more complicated than this (see Dar-nell 1974, 1998; Hinsley 1981; Deloria 1998:9094). Al-though Morgans and eventually the bureaus brand ofsalvage ethnography placed American Indians firmly inthe past (by describing what were perceived to be un-changing beliefs and practices that American civilizationwould eventually subsume), involving Native Americanpeoples in the construction of ethnography also meant,contradictorily, often engaging with Indian politicalstruggles in the present. As Philip J. Deloria (1998:84)writes about Morgans collaboration with Ely and otherParker family members:

The relationships that developed between New Con-federacy [a.k.a. Grand Order of the Iroquois] mem-bers and the Parkers and other Seneca people tookthe group far from the distant abstractions of fiction-alized Indianness and into the free-for-all of Indian-American political conflict. Ely Parker had traveledto Albany to continue a long struggle being wagedby the Tonawanda Seneca, who, under the terms of

an imposed treaty, were scheduled to abandon theirreservation by 1846. The New Confederacys subse-quent involvement with the Senecas foreshadowedwhat has since become something of an anthropo-logical tradition: political activism on behalf of thenative peoples who serve as the objects of study.

Such activist tendencies, spawned by direct collabora-tion with native interlocutors, did indeed foreshadow ananthropological tradition, one that extended right intothe Bureau of American Ethnology.

While Powell originally established the bureau to in-form and influence Indian policy and arguably it neverreally did so, in practice the activism of its individualethnologists often contradicted what came to be its of-ficial apolitical party line (Hinsley 1981). James Mooney,for instance, caused Powell constant headaches (Hin-sley 1976:23). In his Ghost Dance Religion (1896) hehelped to fuel growing public outrage over the WoundedKnee Massacre of 1890, going so far as to suggest, to thechagrin of his superiors, that the religious beliefs andpractices for which Indians had been murdered were inthe same league as Christian beliefs and practices (Hin-sley 1976:2325). Mooney did not stop there, however.Throughout his career as a BAE ethnologist he defendedthe rights of Indian people, often at great cost to his owncareer (cf. Gleach 2002). When he helped the Kiowas,Comanches, and Kiowa Apaches officially organize theirpeyote religion as the Native American Church, for ex-ample, he was barred from working on the Kiowa-Co-manche-Apache reservation ever again (see Moses 1984:20621). This political activism on behalf of the nativepeoples who serve as the objects of study (Deloria 1998:84) was a direct product of Mooneys ethnographic workon the Kiowas, Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians(1898).

One can hardly believe that Mooney would have goneto such lengths, putting his own career in jeopardy, with-out a deep personal commitment developed while sys-tematically encountering, living among, and engagingwith Indian people. The same could be said for manyother BAE ethnologists, such as Frank Hamilton Cush-ing, J. Owen Dorsey, Alice Fletcher, Francis La Flesche,and James R. Walker (Lindberg 2002). Long before Bron-islaw Malinowski insisted that anthropologists moveoff the verandah and into the everyday lives of thenatives (see Stocking 1983), many BAE ethnologists hadmoved into Native communities and were participatingin peoples everyday lives, doing fieldwork in collabo-ration with Indian informants, and, in some cases, fol-lowing in the tradition of Morgan, acting on behalf oftheir subjects. Although political activism was off thebeaten path of mainstream BAE practice (cf. Darnell1998), its presence calls attention to a deeper and morecomplex ethnographic collaboration between ethnogra-phers and native informants that, though vital, was oftenveiled in many early BAE texts.

The texts produced by the Bureau of American Eth-nology between 1879 (when it was founded as a branchof the Smithsonian Institution) and 1964 (when it was


terminated) (Judd 1967) represent perhaps the largest sin-gle corpus of literature ever produced on Native NorthAmericans (see Smithsonian Institution 1971). For themost part, these works employed the authoritative, nor-mative style that was the writing tradition of the day,and their aim was the objective documentation of NativeAmerican beliefs and practices.

Though limited in some ways, the work is immenselyexpansive and impressiveoverwhelming, actuallyand unmatched in its depth and coverage. The unwav-ering commitment of BAE ethnologists to their craft(and, in many cases, to their Indian subjects) is imme-diately apparent. So, too, is the role of Indian collabo-rators in constructing these texts: the close work of BAEethnologists and American Indians is evidenced by manyethnologists references to native collaborators. It is oftenunclear, however, to what extent these Native Americaninformants provided direct assistance or, indeed, con-tributed their own writings.

Some ethnologists, however, delivered more clearlycollaborative ethnographies. Chief among them wasFranz Boas, of course, who worked with Hunt and othercollaborators in several other non-BAE texts as well. Alsoprominent were the efforts of the BAE ethnologist AliceCunningham Fletcher, who, like Boas, explicitly ac-knowledged the role of her assistants (see, e.g., Fletcher1904). Fletcher is perhaps best known for her collabo-rative efforts with Francis La Flesche, with whom shewrote The Omaha Tribe (Fletcher and La Flesche 1911).Both Fletcher and La Flesche were BAE ethnologistswhen their manuscript appeared, but their relationshiphad originally begun with La Flesche serving asFletchers field assistant and interpreter. As their worktogether intensified, so did their relationship: La Fleschebegan referring to Fletcher as mother, and by the early1890s she had adopted him as her legal son (see Liberty1976, 1978b; cf. Lurie 1966, Mark 1988). The professionalcollaboration that would eventually produce The OmahaTribe began when, as Ridington and Hastings (1997:1718) write,

it became obvious, first to him and then to her, that[La Flesche] was a partner rather than simply a son,an interpreter, or an informant. The matter came toa head with her plans to publish a substantial paperentitled A Study of Omaha Indian Music. Francis,himself an accomplished Omaha singer and thesource of much of her information, managed to con-vince his adopted mother that his part in the workshould be recognized in print. . . . By the time oftheir most comprehensive publication, The OmahaTribe, in 1911, Francis had achieved the status ofcoauthor.

Significantly, La Flesches negotiation of his role in theproject was as much a matter of the native interlocutorsdemanding agency as about the anthropologists givingover control. La Flesches insistence on being acknowl-edged was in fact to foreshadow native consultants in-sistence that anthropologists and others include their

names, voices, and contributions in texts about them, ademand that gathered power throughout the twentiethcentury.

Although La Flesche and Fletchers coauthored man-uscript was an exceptional case (Liberty 1976), it markedthe growing involvement of Native American ethnolo-gists in the Bureau of American Ethnology and othermuseum-based institutions. To be sure, several Ameri-can Indian ethnologists had been collaborating with thebureau and other institutions for many years prior to theappearance of Fletcher and La Flesches book and thesubsequent appearance of La Flesches own reports (see,e.g., La Flesche 1921). John N. B. Hewitt, for example, amixed-blood Tuscarora Indian who worked with theBAE ethnologist Erminnie Smith, took over Smithswork after her death in 1886 (Darnell 1998:7071). LikeLa Flesche, Hewitt contributed several of his own reports(see, e.g., Hewitt 1903, 1928).

To put it simply, the collaborations between NativeAmerican ethnologists and other ethnologists, in partic-ular, and with institutions like the Bureau of AmericanEthnology, in general, are significant to appreciating therole of collaboration in the early development of Amer-icanist ethnography, but they do not tell the whole story.Indeed, focusing solely on ethnologist-assistant relation-ships or white-Indian coauthored texts underestimatesthe actual role of collaboration in these early institu-tions. As Darnell (1998:8085) points out, collaborationin the bureau was a complicated, multifaceted affair.Many other peoplesuch as missionaries, former furtraders, and diplomatsalso had intimate knowledge ofIndian languages and cultures, and they also collaboratedwith the bureau to produce its reports, bulletins, andother manuscripts. One need only recall the well-knowncollaborations between Franz Boas and James Teit, aScotsman who had an extensive knowledge of severalNorthwest tribes (see, e.g., Teit 1930). Native Americanethnologists like Hewitt and La Flesche, it turns out,were just some of the many kinds of semiprofessionalswho had close associations with American Indian peo-ples, knew native languages, and contributed theirunique skills and knowledge to the bureaus goal of col-lecting Native American beliefs and practices before theypresumably disappeared forever.

This is not to diminish the role of Native Americansin the bureau or other museum-based institutionsonlyto suggest that, while clearly seeking to elaborate morefully a native point of view through the use of knowl-edgeable collaborators, the bureau was not interested inusing these collaborations for critiquing Western societyand culture (although many individual ethnologists, likeMooney, certainly did), much less negotiating ethnog-raphys ultimate goals. This would come later as an-thropologists became much more intimately and criti-cally aware of the colonially derived separation betweenthose doing the representing (the Self) and those provid-ing the firsthand data for these representations (theOther)a separation that became all the more pro-nounced as anthropology became a professional disci-pline more firmly situated in the academy (cf. Fabian


1983). Whereas this critique became prominent alongwith a more explicitly expressed critical anthropology inthe 1970s and 1980s, it had its beginnings much sooner:with the emergence of American Indian life historiesunder the influence of Paul Radin.

Beginning with his 1913 Journal of American Folkloreessay Personal Reminiscences of a Winnebago Indian,continuing with the publication in 1920 of Autobiog-raphy of a Winnebago Indian, and culminating with theappearance of Crashing Thunder in 1926 (1913, 1920,1926), Radins earliest experiments with Winnebago bi-ography marked the beginning of truly rigorous workin the field of biography by professional anthropologists(Langness 1965:7). Indeed, to this day Radins work withwhat came to be generally known as life history is stillwidely regarded as among the most significant efforts tomerge individual experience with ethnographic descrip-tions of culture (Darnell 2001:13770).

Radins fieldwork among the Winnebago was carriedout intermittently between 1908 and 1913 (see Du Bois1960), and in 1911 and 1912 he did ethnography underthe auspices of the Bureau of American Ethnology. In thebureaus twenty-seventh annual report (published in1923) he supplemented his exhaustive description of theWinnebago tribe with numerous first-person narratives(see Radin 1923). Two of the collaborators who providedtheir first-person accounts were Radins principal in-formants (Radin 1926:xxi), Jasper Blowsnake and hisyounger brother Sam Blowsnake, both of whom he reliedon considerably to construct his subsequent Winnebago(auto)biographies (Krupat 1983). Radin used Jasper Blow-snakes autobiography in Personal Reminiscences of aWinnebago Indian, in which, being a student of Boas,he followed the standard Boasian procedure for repre-senting native texts: Jasper Blowsnakes description ofhis life, written in his native language, was presentedalong with the English translation. In Autobiography ofa Winnebago Indian, based on Sam Blowsnakes auto-biography, Radin deviated from his previous approach:he did not include a native text in Winnebago (but didinclude 351 notes in this short, 91-page account). InCrashing Thunder, Radin went even farther, expandingAutobiography of a Winnebago Indian to make the textmore artfully literary and readable (Krupat 1983).

While Radins approach to life history was straight-forwardto describe a life in relation to the social groupin which he [the subject] had grown up (1920:2)hisappreciation for and representation of life history as textwas not as simple. He no doubt recognized the problemsand limitations of the conventional approach to nativetexts (Vidich 1966)that language and story were not inthemselves facts but a textualization of facts which,of course, could yield multiple and divergent interpre-tations (Krupat 1983:xixv). In Personal Reminiscencesof a Winnebago Indian, for example, he (1913:294)briefly warned of the problems inherent in constructingand translating a life history, and in his Method andTheory of Ethnology (1933:1112) he elaborated on theseproblems:

In science we stand beside or, if you will, above thefacts. We are not a part of them. But we are a part ofthe cultural facts we are describing in a very realway. The moment we stand beside or above them,we do them injury; we transvaluate and make themfacts of another order. In short, they are reduced tofacts of the physical world. The disadvantages atten-dant upon being an integral part of the phenomenonwe are describing must seem a fatal defect to thescientific mind. Unquestionably it is. But it is inher-ent in cultural phenomena and nothing can verywell be done about it. This defect is not being cor-rected by treating them as physical facts. Objectiv-ity, in the sense in which it exists in the natural andphysical sciences, is impossible for culture history,except, perhaps, in the domain of material culture.For culture, the ideal of permanency and durabilitytoward which a description of the physical world in-evitably strives is unattainable. The more culturehistorians and ethnologists attempt it, the more sus-pect their descriptions become. There are too manyimponderabilia, and these are too intimately con-nected with its very life blood.

This position was critical to Radins approach to repre-senting individual experience through biography (cf. Dia-mond 1981). Although anthropologists such as Boas andMalinowski had relied heavily on individual collabora-tors to elaborate the facts of culture, Radin argued thatthese individual collaborators and their experiences werelargely absent from ethnographic accounts because ofethnologists overzealous attempts to quantify and typifyculture. Individual experience was too messy for them,argued Radin, (1933:42), too subjective, and as a conse-quence the method of describing a culture without anyreference to the individual except in so far as he is anexpression of rigidly defined cultural forms manifestlyproduces a distorted picture.

Just as Radins Crashing Thunder had marked a sig-nificant turning point in the use of life history, his ar-gument for more firmly situating individual experienceat the center of ethnographic inquiry marked an ex-tremely significant turning point in Americanist eth-nography itself. What it required was a more sustainedfocus on collaboration with native interlocutors, non-anthropologists with differing worldviews and perspec-tives who had their own unique experiences to presentin an ethnography that was to be clearly separated fromthe personality of the ethnologist (see Radin 1933:87129). Arguably, the Americanist focus on presentingnative texts in their original form did just this. Broadlydefined, many of these texts consisted, for example, ofthe myths, stories, and legends relayed by native inform-ants; more narrowly defined, many of them were writtenby native assistants in their native language and trans-lated, transcribed, and/or edited by the ethnologist. FranzBoas, of course, became the most widely recognized pro-ponent of this latter approach, with the Boas-Hunt col-laborations representing its quintessential illustration.As Briggs and Bauman (1999) point out, in collaborations


such as this one the subjects of inquiry were largely cho-sen by the ethnologist. Although Radin (1933:114) ad-mitted complicity, his focus on the life experience of hiscollaborators helped to usher in an innovative way ofconceptualizing the structure of ethnography as basedmore on the informants choices of story, narrative de-vice, style, and flow (see Darnell 2001:13770).

Within American Indian studies, Radins focus on in-dividual experience in culture set the stage for subse-quent life histories that shifted away from the psychol-ogy of the individualas articulated by Edward Sapir(1934)and toward the relativistic representation of ex-perience. Radins approach also set the stage for moreintensive long-term collaborations between ethnogra-phers and native consultants that are perhaps unmatchedin any other subfield of ethnographic inquiry (see Darnell2001:10570).

While the collaborative model for constructing life his-tories had a profound effect on the production of(auto)biography, it also fostered a more general collabo-rative approach to Native American ethnography. AsDarnell (2001:208) writes, The dialogic potentials of lifehistory discourse are considerable, although the genresof ethnographic production that develop them havemoved, in practice, beyond life history in the narrowsense. Contemporary Americanists reflect teachingsfrom multiple Native specialists, emphasizing sharingand transmitting of knowledge rather than narrative au-thority jealously guarded by the anthropologist. Amer-ican Indian studies are therefore replete with collabor-atively conceived and dialogically informed ethno-graphic projects (not always coauthored) such as the useof Yuchi focus groups to construct community-basedtexts (Jackson 2003), the bringing together of museumresources to document a local chapter of the NativeAmerican Church at the request of Osage peyotists(Swan 2002), the use of a community-based editorialboard to construct a locally centered text on the Bay AreaAmerican Indian community (Lobo et al. 2002), the useof collaborative methodologies and textual strategies byan anthropologist and his Kiowa relatives (Palmer 2003),and even the collaboration of a university press with theSalish Kootenai tribal government to produce a tribaloral history (Gary Dunham, personal communication,January 3, 2002).

Increasingly, of course, all ethnographers are findingthemselves addressing issues of collaboration. Indeed, eth-nographers in and outside of the Americanist tradition(e.g., the British and French) have also long dealt withthese issues (see Sanjek 1993). Yet something uniquelyAmerican is at work in the history of collaboration in theAmericanist tradition. Americans as a whole, of course,have long struggled with reconciling the differences be-tween the ideal of equality, on the one hand, and the veryreal consequences of living in an inequitable society strat-ified along the lines of race, class, and gender, on the other(see Smedley 1993). Similarly, Americanist ethnographyhas more or less since its inception faced this paradox,especially as its subjects, assistants, informants, collabo-rators, and consultants have sought equal time and rep-

resentation in the larger ethnographic project as under-taken, primarily, by middle-to-upper-class white Euro-American anthropologists (cf. Said 1979).

As American anthropologists in general turned awayfrom American subjects and toward the British andFrench schools of anthropology for methodological andtheoretical inspiration, such direct involvement of na-tive collaborators became easier to sidestep. Moreover,the divisions between researchers and their subjects be-came all the more pronounced as anthropology becamea professional academic discipline in its own right, de-veloping and then emphasizing credentials that clearlyseparated the academic professional from the so-calledamateur anthropologist (which included, of course, thenon-university-trained American Indian). As the disci-pline solidified and professionalized, the writing of ob-jective ethnography fell to scientifically trained anduniversity-sited academics who tended to base their in-tellectual authority on the single-authored text. Indeed,collaborations between the likes of La Flesche andFletcher would prove much more difficult to achieve inan academic setting, where to this day the single-au-thored text is valued over the multiple-authored text,interdisciplinary work among professionals over collab-orative work between professionals and nonprofession-als, and academic credentials over experiential ones.With the academic professionalization of anthropologyfirmly in place, collaboration with ethnographic con-sultants was seemingly put on hold, only to resurface infields such as feminist and postmodernist anthropology.

Feminist Anthropology

At least since the 1970s, womens studies scholars havecontended that feminism linked with conventional so-cial science research methods can yield more humaneand dialogic accounts that more fullyand more colla-borativelyrepresent the diversity of experience (see,e.g., Bowles and Duelli Klein 1983; cf. Westcott 1979).The feminist scholar Renate Duelli Klein (1983:9495),for example, argued that

whenever possible, feminist methodology should al-low for such intersubjectivity; this will permit theresearcher constantly to compare her work with herown experience as a woman and a scientist and toshare it with the researched, who then will add theiropinions to the research, which in turn might againchange it.

A methodology that allows for women studyingwomen in an interactive processwithout the artifi-cial object/subject split between researcher and re-searched (which is by definition inherent in any ap-proach to knowledge that praises its neutralityand objectivity) will end the exploitation ofwomen as research objects.

Many feminists agreed. Our work, wrote Barbara DuBois (1983:110), needs to generate words, concepts, that


refer to, that spring from, that are firmly and richlygrounded in the actual experiencing of women. And thisdemands methods of inquiry that open up our seeing andour thinking, our conceptual frameworks, to new per-ceptions that actually derive from womens experience.

Some feminist ethnographers have argued, however,that a feminist methodology might be more problematicthan advantageous to the agendas of a larger, critical fem-inist theory. In Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?Judith Stacey (1988:22) argued that although the eth-nographic method . . . appears ideally suited to feministresearch [in that it] . . . draws on those resources of em-pathy, connection, and concern that many feminists con-sider to be womens special strengths, she ultimatelyquestioned whether the appearance of greater respectfor and equality with research subjects in the ethno-graphic approach masks a deeper, more dangerous formof exploitation. She pointed to the contradictions be-tween critical feminism, on the one hand, and collabo-rative ethnographic approaches, on the otherespeciallywhen the researchers feminism conflicted with theagendas of her subjects. She reported, for example, thatone of her informants, a fundamentalist Christian, hadasked her to not reveal the secret lesbian relationshipabout which she had spoken to her. This intimate knowl-edge not only highlighted the potential for exploitation(if, for instance, Stacey had chosen to write about thisethnographic fact anyway) but also drew attention tothe differences between Staceys goals as a critical fem-inist and that of her interlocutor, who presumably ac-cepted the larger societys disparaging view of homosex-uals. Principles of respect for research subjects and fora collaborative, egalitarian research relationship, wroteStacey (1988:24), would suggest compliance, but thisforces me to collude with the homophobic silencing oflesbian experience, as well as to consciously distort whatI consider a crucial component of the ethnographictruth in my study. Whatever we decide, my ethnogra-phy will betray a feminist principle. These moral di-lemmas notwithstanding, in the end Stacey was gener-ally hopeful about the attainment of a feministethnography. Following James Cliffords assertion thatethnographic truths are . . . inherently partial (Clifford1986:7), she concluded (p. 26) that while there cannotbe a fully feminist ethnography, there can be (indeedthere are) ethnographies that are partially feminist, ac-counts of culture enhanced by the application of feministperspectives. . . . I believe the potential benefits of par-tially feminist ethnography seem worth the seriousmoral costs involved.

Ensuing feminist, reciprocal ethnographieslikethose written by Elaine Lawless (1993), in which theresearchers feminism and the experience of the re-searched are negotiated and presented within the pagesof the same text (even when they differ)would in partresolve the disparities noted by Stacey and consequentlyinch a partially feminist ethnography a bit closer to afully feminist ethnography. But the potentials for afeminist ethnography revisited a larger problem in the dis-cipline: contemporary feminist approaches that shared

ethnographys goals with subjects placed a feminist eth-nography in an inferior position relative to emergentmore professional ethnographic experiments (cf. Strath-ern 1987). Simply put, it wasnt objective enough. Al-though an emergent postmodernist anthropology wasalso experimenting with ethnographic forms, strugglingwith issues of power and authority, and challenging no-tions of objectivity (as in Clifford and Marcus 1986), theadvances in feminist ethnography along these lines werelargely dismissed and ignored by itsmostly malepro-ponents (Behar 1995). Lila Abu-Lughod has suggested, inher own Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?(1990a), that feminist ethnographers stood to lose toomuch in an emerging critical anthropology dominatedby a hyper-professionalism that is more exclusive thanthat of ordinary anthropology (p. 19) and one that con-tinued to reify a now obscured presumption of objectivedistance maintained by the traditional rhetoric of socialscience (p. 18). If a feminist ethnography challengedconventional ethnography by emphasizing everyday ex-perience and everyday language (which engendered a pre-sumably more simplified and less rigorous analysisvia its identification and collaboration with unprofes-sional collaborators), then a more professional, the-oretical, and rigorous ethnography challenged con-ventional ethnography by foregrounding a rarefied,jargonistic discourse (which presumed to engender amore complex analysis undertaken without the con-straints of reciprocal responses from consultants). Eventhough, in actuality, the rigor of feminist ethnographyrevolves around the very complex negotiation of visionsbetween ethnographers and interlocutors, collaborativeand reciprocal approaches were once again, within thelarger field (social science in general, anthropology inparticular), caught not only within the still resonatingdivisions between professional and unprofessional workbut also within the still very powerful if now obscureddivisions between objective and subjective, betweentheoretical and descriptive, and between mascu-line and feminine. As a consequence, Abu-Lughod(1990a:19) argued, contemporary feminist anthropolo-gists may not have pushed as hard as they might onepistemological issues nor experimented much withform . . . perhaps because, within an anthropologicalmilieu in which the cross-cultural findings of a feministanthropology (that is, of gender) were still relatively new,they preferred to establish their credibility, gain accep-tance, and further their intellectual and political aims.

Whether there can be a truly feminist ethnography ornot, Abu-Lughod and other feminist scholars in and out-side of anthropology (see, e.g., Bell 1993, Reinharz 1992,Stack 1993, Visweswaran 1988, Wolf 1992) suggest thata feminist ethnography can nevertheless offer anthro-pology a powerful reconceptualization of the goals of eth-nography itself. In short, feminist ethnography is nowbroadly defined as an experimental ethnography thatquestions the positionality and authority of the ethno-graphic process (from fieldwork to text), foregrounds andsimultaneously seeks to dissolve the power relationshipbetween ethnographer and subject, and, perhaps most


important, contextualizes ethnographic writing within abroader consciousness of the historical trajectories offeminist texts (rather than in terms of the response tothe classic modernist male-centered ethnographictexts from which postmodernism arguably springs) (Vi-sweswaran 1992, 1997). Feminist ethnography embracesa more conscious politics of representation, but in con-trast to many dialogic approaches it also seeks to exposethe unequal distribution of power that has subordinatedwomen in most if not all cultures and [to] discover waysof dismantling hierarchies of domination (Wolf 1992:119).

Feminist ethnography also offers anthropology an eth-nography written by ethnographers who, as womenwhose knowledge is situated vis-a`-vis their male coun-terparts (cf. Haraway 1988), are already Other (see Mas-cia-Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen 1989). A feminist ethnog-raphy, which unapologetically upholds a nonpositivistperspective, rebuilding the social sciences and producingnew concepts concerning women (Reinharz 1992:46),is a research process whereby others study othersand, as in studies by native anthropologists of their owncommunities (see Abu-Lughod 1990b; cf. Limon 1990),openly struggle in both fieldwork and ethnographic textswith issues of sameness (where both researcher and re-searched are women who share similar experiences withsystems of domination) and difference (where class andrace, for example, play a prominent role in interpreta-tions of the complexities of gender) (cf. Moore 1988). Byworking with the assumptions of difference in same-ness, writes Abu-Lughod (1990a:2526, 27), of a selfthat participates in multiple identifications, and an otherthat is also partially the self, we might be moving beyondthe impasse of the fixed self/other or subject/object di-vide that so disturbs the new ethnographers. . . . [Thus]the creation of a self through opposition to an other isblocked [in feminist ethnography], and therefore both themultiplicity of the self, and the multiple, overlapping,and interacting qualities of other cannot be ignored.2

2. Several women ethnographers had sought to do just this before.Perhaps the best-known example is Marjorie Shostaks Nisa: TheLife and Words of a !Kung Woman (1981), in which Shostak framesher ethnography in terms of this interaction between sameness anddifference (pp. 56, 7): My initial field trip took place at a timewhen traditional values concerning marriage and sexuality werebeing questioned in my own culture. The Womens Movement hadjust begun to gain momentum, urging re-examination of the rolesWestern women had traditionally assumed. I hoped the field tripmight help me to clarify some of the issues the Movement hadraised. !Kung women might be able to offer some answers; afterall, they provided most of their families food, yet cared for theirchildren and were lifelong wives as well. . . . I presented myself tothem pretty much as I saw myself at the time: a girl-woman, re-cently married, struggling with the issues of love, marriage, sex-uality, work, and identitybasically, with what womanhood meantto me. I asked the !Kung women what being a woman meant tothem and what events had been important in their lives. But theexperience of Shostak and that of !Kung women also diverged invery significant ways. For example, their culture, unlike ours, wasnot being continuously disrupted by social and political factionstelling them first that women were one way, then another. In theend, her ethnography was meant to illustrate the diversity ofwomens experience (through an intimate portrayal of Nisas life),

Simply put, feminist ethnography is writing carried outby a woman author who is always aware that she is awoman writing (Behar 2003:40).

Conceptualized in this way, feminist ethnography hasfor the most part been associated with women ethnog-raphers and the reciprocal and collaborative relationshipswith women interlocutors that have engendered its ap-proach. Indeed, as feminist ethnography developed in re-sponse to patriarchal research and writing methods thateither ignored women or dismissed feminist theory andmethods altogether as irrelevant to larger discussionsabout ethnography, a feminist approach has more oftenthan not implied that only ethnography in the handsof feminists . . . renders it feminist (Reinharz 1992:48).But, given its gendered marginalization (Abu-Lughod1990a, b) and given that many feminist ethnographersquestion whether feminist theory and anthropology canestablish more common ground (Gordon 1993, Strathern1987), feminist ethnography actually has more similar-ities than differences with the dialogic and collaborativeethnographic experiments of the past several decades(and, indeed, with Americanist life-history accounts)(Caplan 1998, Visweswaran 1992). In particular, feministethnographys central focus on voice, power, and repre-sentation is converging with the central focus of eth-nography in postmodernist anthropology (cf. di Leonardo1991).

Postmodernist Anthropology

A more general critique of anthropologys claims to anability to handle the complexities of a postcolonial andpostindustrial world authoritatively and objectivelyconverged in the 1980s with the emergence of a post-modernist anthropology. While the modern developmentof anthropology in the first three-quarters of the twen-tieth century had advanced the Western-centered projectof the Enlightenment, emphasizing science and reason,authority and objectivity, positivism and realism, post-modernist anthropology resituated the goals of anthro-pology within a more complicated multicultural world(outside the divide between the West and the Rest), in-stead emphasizing power and voice, subjectivity and di-alogue, complexity and critique (cf. Clifford 1986, 1988;Marcus 1992, 1999; Tyler 1987). In ethnography, specif-ically, the emergence of postmodernism marked a con-fluence of previous ethnographic approachessuch asthat embraced by cognitive, symbolic, and humanisticanthropologythat had for some time variously strug-gled and experimented with the limitations of the eth-nographic craft in representing the lived complexities ofculture and experience from the native point of view(Marcus and Fischer 1986).

and, to a lesser extent, to present experiential alternatives towomens statuses and roles in the Western world (see Marcus andFischer 1986:5859 and Pratt 1986:4246 for a more critical dis-cussion). More recent examples that adopt this approach (perhapsmore fully than Shostak) include Abu-Lughod (1993), Behar (1993),and Brown (1991).


Marcus and Fischer (1986:1744) argue that interpre-tive anthropology, in particular, provided the context foraddressing this so-called crisis of representation. Withthe recognition of a more complex field (in which un-touched cultures no longer existed, anthropologist andtheir interlocutors were more and more politically, so-cially, economically, and intellectually interconnectedin a global political economy, and new and shifting fieldsites demanded new research strategies), interpretiveethnographers revitalized experimentation with ethno-graphic forms that might bring anthropology forcefullyinto line with its twentieth-century promises of authen-tically representing cultural differences and respond toworld and intellectual conditions quite different fromthose in which [ethnography] became a particular kindof genre (pp. 4243).

While there were and continue to be many types ofethnographic experiments (variously conveying othercultural experience and/or taking into account worldhistorical political economy [Marcus and Fischer 1986:45110]), many interpretive anthropologists have fo-cused on dialogue as a key metaphor (rather than thetextual metaphor established by Clifford Geertz [1973])for reconceptualizing the ethnographic process. Dia-logue has become the imagery for expressing the wayanthropologists (and by extension, their readers) mustengage in an active communicative process with anotherculture, wrote Marcus and Fischer (1986:30) about thisshift in focus. It is a two-way and two-dimensionalexchange, interpretive processes being necessary both forcommunication internally within a cultural system andexternally between systems of meaning.

While many interpretive anthropologists engaged thedialogic metaphor more or less symbolically, some eth-nographers took the metaphor more literally, looking tothe dialogic processes of fieldwork itself to construct eth-nographies that were more representative of the collab-orative production of knowledge between anthropolo-gist(s) and informant(s)that is, to present multiplevoices within a text, and to encourage readings from di-verse perspectives (Marcus and Fischer 1986:68). KevinDwyers Moroccan Dialogues (1987) is perhaps the best-known example. Dwyers approach is similar to narrativeethnography in its focus on shared experience (see Ted-lock 1991), but he narrows the field of vision even more,focusing on and problematizing the dialogic emergenceof culture throughout. His purpose in doing so is to chal-lenge the authority of the single-voiced monograph and,perhaps more important, to show how the complexitiesof Others are often lost in the textual world of paragraphsand sentences. The anthropologist who encounters peo-ple from other societies is not merely observing them orattempting to record their behavior, wrote Dwyer (1987:xviii); both he and the people he confronts, and thesocietal interests that each represents, are engaging eachother creatively, producing the new phenomenon of Selfand Other becoming interdependent, of Self and Othersometimes challenging, sometimes accommodating oneanother. Recognizing, of course, that presenting Mo-roccan dialogues in text and in English is itself an act of

distanced interpretation, a fiction, Dwyer challenged thereader to question the content of the ethnographic textand, more important, its goals and purposes (p. xix):

If a faithful record, a full communication, of the ex-perience is impossible, this is no excuse to reducethe effort to preserve in the text, and to convey toothers, what one believes to be crucial in that expe-rience. The effectiveness of this book should bejudged, then, not in the light of a necessarily mis-taken criterion of fidelity to experience, but in termsof the significance of taking certain aspects, ratherthan others, as essential, and the books success indisplaying them: here, the structured inequality andinterdependence of Self and Other, the inevitablelink between the individuals action and his or herown societys interests, and the vulnerability and in-tegrity of the Self and the Other.

Dwyers version of dialogic ethnography called for closescrutiny of the nature of cross-cultural understandingand appreciation of the very real challenges faced by eth-nographers when they seek to forge experience as text.Simply put, Dwyer concentrated on process.

Other classic dialogic works that variously took upthese kinds of issues include Vincent Crapanzanos Tu-hami (1980), Jean Briggss Never in Anger (1970), andJeanne Favret-Saadas Deadly Worlds (1980) (cf. Marcusand Fischer 1986:6971). While many of these ethnog-raphies focused on the collaborative production ofknowledge and directly challenged the goals of ethnog-raphy by resituating its power and authority in the di-alogic process, writing dialogic ethnography did not nec-essarily mean engagement in collaborative practice withinterlocutors to produce collaboratively conceived texts(cf. Tyler 1987). Many interpretive anthropologists em-braced the metaphor of dialogue in their fieldwork andwriting, but only a few ethnographers took the metaphorto this next logical step. Of course, several ethnographershad continued in the collaborative tradition of Hunt andBoas or Fletcher and La Flesche, coauthoring ethno-graphic texts with key informants/consultants (see, e.g.,Bahr et al. 1974, Majnep and Bulmer 1977), but otherswere going a critical step farther by seeking to includereactions from their consultants in their ethnographictexts.3 Examples includein addition to those of theAmericanist and feminist tradition already mentionedDouglas E. Foley and companys From Peones to Polit-icos (1988), an ethnography of ethnic relations betweenAnglos and Mexicanos in a South Texas town, whichincludes native responses to the text; John C. Messen-gers Inis Beag Revisited (1983), an ethnography focusingon a shipwreck off the coast of an island west of Ireland,

3. I consider this step critical because, as Radin (1927, 1933) pointedout, engaging in coauthored projects does not necessarily meanengagement with diverging worldviews, especially when coauthorsmove to write conventional, authoritative, academically positionedtexts. By including consultant commentary these ethnographersproblematized audience in a different way by directly challenging(at the very least implicitly) the authority of the ethnographer tospeak solely for the Other (see Clifford 1983).


a folk song that Messenger composed about the ship-wreck, and the islanders mixed reactions to both thesong and his controversial ethnographic texts; and JamesL. Peacocks Purifying the Faith (1978), an accountpartrealist description, part symbolic analysis, part narrativeethnographyof the history, beliefs, and practices of amovement to reform Islam in Indonesia that includescommentary from one of Peacocks collaborators (pre-sented as a preface) (cf. Lassiter 2001).

Although ethnographies that considered responsesfrom the natives (even negative ones, as is the casewith Messengers work) were exceptions to the rule andinvolved different views of collaboration, they foreshad-owed a focus on a trope of collaboration that wouldemerge full-blown in critical ethnography. This ethnog-raphy was marked by a number of important texts, in-cluding James Clifford and George E. Marcuss WritingCulture (1986), George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fi-schers Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986), JamesCliffords The Predicament of Culture (1988), and RenatoRosaldos Culture and Truth (1989)all of which arguedfor a more ethical, humanistic, interpretive, intersubjec-tive, dialogic, and experimental ethnography. Althoughmany social scientists have taken these writers to task,the influence of their texts on the practice of ethnogra-phy today is unmistakable: few ethnographers embarkon their projects without bearing these issues in mind(cf. Marcus 1994). Ethnography today involves a criticaland reflexive process whereby ethnographers and theirinterlocutors regularly assess not only how their collab-orative work engenders the dialogic emergence of culture(and the verity of their shared understandings) but alsothe goals and the audiences of the ethnographic productsthese collaborative relationships produce. Indeed, eth-nography no longer operates under the ideal of discov-ering new worlds like explorers of the fifteenth century.Rather we step into a stream of already existing repre-sentations produced by journalists, prior anthropologists,historians, creative writers, and of course the subjects ofstudy themselves (Fischer and Marcus 1999:xx). Withthe gap between ethnographer and consultant ever nar-rowing, collaboration between ethnographers and inter-locutorsboth of whom exist within and partake of alarger economy of representations in varied and compli-cated waystakes on a whole new meaning.

Consider, for example, Paul Rabinows reflections onthe collaborations that produced the writing of MakingPCR (1996)an ethnography of the polymerase chainreaction (PCR) as it developed in the biotechnology com-pany Cetus Corporation. In his essay American Mod-erns: On Sciences and Scientists (1999), Rabinow traceshis collaboration with Tom White, a former vice presi-dent of Cetus. White engaged Rabinow in the project,giving him open access to scientists at all levels in theinstitution. He wanted an anthropologist to elaborate thecomplexities of the industry at a time when popular mis-understandings about biotechnology abounded, but morethan this White hoped that the collaboration couldmake him more productive. He never blurred the dis-tinction between the technical and the therapeutic,

never asked me to play a facilitator or therapeutic role.He remained attentive to possible operationalizable as-pects arising from my analysis. One thing he wanted toknow was how to create an environment for future dis-coveries (p. 328). While Whites goals helped to pro-duce the foundation for collaboration, Rabinows goalsdiverged from them in that he wanted to explore therelationships between the culture of science and the cul-ture of the humanities (which includes the sociologicalstudy of science). In short, Rabinows and Whites goalsmay not have been identical, but Rabinows ethnographydid indeed help to advance Whites agenda to makesomething different happen that he couldnt entirelycontrol (Rabinow 1999:332)a collaborative venturethat he hoped would produce the same kinds of inno-vative results (in this case a text) for which Cetus wasalready well-known.

George E. Marcus (1995, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001) hasargued that such experimentsconscious of both thelarger interconnected streams of representations and thechanging contexts of fieldwork todaymay finally bepushing anthropology toward realizing the potentials ofthe 1980s critique of anthropology. While anthropologistshad always sought to establish rapport with their inform-ants as a prerequisite for collecting their ethnographicdata within the traditional mise-en-sce`ne of field-workthat is the intensively-focused-upon single siteof ethnographic observation and participation (Marcus1995:96)and had, consequently, sought to build theirshared understandings collaboratively (Marcus 1997), thespecific attention given to dialogue and collaboration inthe 1980s critique had great potential to unveil and makeexplicit the challenges of collaboration often glossed overby the trope of rapport. As Marcus (2001:521) writes,

The relational context envisioned by the 1980s cri-tique of anthropology for the explorations of levelsand kinds of reflexivity in fieldwork was the idea ofcollaboration and the de facto but unrecognizedcoauthorship of ethnography. This reenvisioning ofthe traditional mise-en-sce`ne of fieldwork as beingcollaborative was potentially the most provocativeand transformative reinterpretation of conventionalethnographic authority to which the use of the con-cept of rapport was wedded. . . . Rapport signaled in-strumentally building a relationship with a partici-pant or informant with the predesigned purposes ofthe anthropologists inquiry in mind and withoutthe possibility that those very purposes could bechanged by the evolution of the fieldwork relation-ship itself, governed by building rapport. In contrast,collaboration entails joint production, but with over-lapping mutual as well as differing purposes, negoti-ation, contestation, and uncertain outcomes.

In the same way as the dialogic metaphor came to replacethe textual metaphor in interpretive anthropology, thecollaborative metaphor came to replace the dialogic met-aphor in critical anthropology. Given this, though, thetrope of collaboration that emerged in the 1980s critique


failed to displace the older tropes that even now con-tinue to define the regulative ideals of fieldwork in theprofessional culture of anthropologists, continues Mar-cus (2001:521). The idea of rapport was too established,too enmeshed within positivist rhetorical style, and thustoo legitimating to be replaced. And so, its use has per-sisted even after the 1980s critique.

Essentially serving as another word for rapport,then, collaboration indeed became cliche in the 1980sand 1990s (and remains so today), while actual experi-ments in collaboration like those mentioned above wereforgotten (2001:522). Marcus argues, however, that thecontemporary challenges of fieldwork like that describedby Rabinow (1996, 1999) present a new set of emergingnorms and expectations for fieldwork for which collab-oration is a key trope and transformative practice for thewhole ethnographic enterprise. In an ever-evolving,shifting, and multisited field in which dichotomies suchas West/East and local/global have lost their methodo-logical utility, ethnographers are now, perhaps more thanever, having to reflect on the challenges that collabora-tion presents to both ethnographic fieldwork and rep-resentation (see Marcus 1998, 1999). In sum, critical eth-nography can potentially move collaboration from thetaken-for-granted background of ethnography to itsforeground.

With this in mind, Marcus (1997) argues that collab-oration explicitly uncovers the differing purposes, goals,and agendas in ethnography and makes the relationshipsinherent in fieldwork even more central to the writingof critical ethnography. But collaboration also advancesthe goal of a critical ethnography to articulate the activ-ism and citizenship of the anthropologist as a more com-plete participant in the larger anthropological project ofsocial justice and equitywhich, although in many waysuniquely American (see Marcus 2001:520), now strugglesto be engaged as a public, as well as an ethical, act. Hav-ing to shift personal positions in relation to ones sub-jects, writes Marcus (1999:1718), and other active dis-courses in fields that overlap with ones own generatesa sense of doing more than just traditional ethnography,and it provides a sense of being an activist in even themost apolitical fieldworker. Indeed, as Marcus (1999:27) continues,

there are very clearly other constituencies for ethno-graphic work that break the frame of the isolatedscholarly enterprise: again, circumstantial activismand the citizen anthropologist become an integralpart of ethnography. Work slips in and out of para-public settings; it is answerable to ones subjects inmore substantial ways than in the past; it becomesthoroughly immersed in other kinds of writing ma-chines in the space of its operations. Knowledge canbe produced in this way also, but what sort ofknowledge and for whom? Being open to this radicaltransformation of the research process is what is atstake in acting on a crisis of representation.

In pulling ethnography, collaboration, citizenship, and

activism into one stream, Marcus suggests, being opento this radical transformation has enormous potentialto relocate ethnography within public currents that en-gage ethnographers and consultants in representationalprojects that realize a more explicit collaborative prac-tice.

Envisioning critical ethnography as a reflective pro-cess of choosing between conceptual alternatives andmaking value-laden judgments of meaning and methodto challenge research, policy, and other forms of humanactivity (Thomas 1993:4) closely coincides with thetime-honored focus on collaboration within applied an-thropology (see, e.g., Austin, 2003, LeCompte et al. 1999,Stull and Schensul 1987) and feminist anthropology,which made this connection over a decade ago. Femi-nist research is more closely aligned with applied an-thropology, wrote Frances E. Mascia-Lees, PatriciaSharpe, and Colleen Ballerino Cohen (1989:2324). Whiletheir purpose was to distinguish between feminist re-search and an emergent experimental ethnography, todaythe differences between feminist ethnography and thecritical ethnography that emerged from the still reso-nating experimental moment are less clear. Taken to-gether, the differences between its goals and those of anapplied anthropology are also less clear, but this shouldnot be surprising. The goals of anthropology seem to beshifting as the disciplines practitioners, academic andapplied, establish themselves in streams of practice morerelevant, more public, and more accessible to a diversityof constituencies (cf. Basch et al. 1999, Hill and Baba2000). Collaborative ethnography, in my view, is situatedsquarely at the center of this newly emergent and pub-licly engaged trajectory.

Intersections: Contemporary Strategies forCollaborative Ethnographic Practice

From such complex roots one would expect complex andmultifaceted approaches to collaboration, and these ap-proaches are indeed diverse. While, as Marcus points out,the notion of collaboration has long been cliched in eth-nographic practice, ethnographers have begun to outlinemore specific collaborative strategies for embracing thepublics with which they work. In general, these strate-gies fall into six (not mutually exclusive) categories: (1)principal consultants as readers and editors, (2) focusgroups, (3) editorial boards, (4) collaborative ethnogra-pher/consultant teams, (5) community forums, and (6)coproduced and cowritten texts.

Many ethnographers have used principal consultantsas readers and collaborative editors for a very long timepresenting their ethnographic texts, as Richard Horwitz(1996:137) describes it, to the informant for review, in-viting corrections . . . [and] edit[ing] the final draft to-getherbut few have actually detailed the more com-plex methodological processes involved in this type ofcollaborative ethnography, especially the negotiation ofdifferences in interpretation (see Lassiter 2000, 2001).


Horwitz reports that his own editing sessions haveranged from the most congenial to the most acrimoniousencounters of my adult life.

Using concrete examples from his own research, Hor-witz points out that collaborative reading and editingwith key ethnographic consultants is a two-way processin which differences in visions, agendas, and expecta-tions emerge that are not always easily resolved. Manycollaborative ethnographers (see, e.g., Evers and Toelken2001, Hinson 1999, Lawless 1992) have argued that col-laborative reading and editing with consultants shouldbe understood as a conversation situated within a veryparticular relationship and undertaken in a very partic-ular time and placea dialogue about rather than a finalstatement on any particular ethnographic topic (see Las-siter 2004b).

A second collaborative strategy is the use of focusgroups (see e.g., Bernard 1995:22429). For example,when I was writing The Power of Kiowa Song (Lassiter1998), in addition to having individual Kiowa consul-tants read the entire text I met with small groups ofKiowa people to review individual chapters that includedissues in which they were interested. Many of my con-sultants of course lacked the time, the energy, or thedesire to invest in my project on the same level as theprincipal consultants, and focus groups allowed them tobe involved in responding to and commenting on thetext.

Similar to the use of focus groups is the use of formaleditorial boards appointed by the community. This strat-egy is common in American Indian studies, for instance,where tribal councils (or appointed committees from thetribal council) may serve as editorial boards of sorts. Theuse of these boards may seem only bureaucratic, theironly purpose being to rubber-stamp the final text (seeMihesuah 1993), but in some cases it has provided theopportunity for the kind of collaborative reading and ed-iting that moves ethnographic texts in the direction ofcollaborative ethnography. For example, for the book Ur-ban Voices (Lobo et al. 2002), an editorial committeematerialized from a series of conversations about col-lecting the oral histories of the Bay Area American Indiancommunity. This editorial committee, made up of theanthropologist Susan Lobo and members of the local In-dian community, directed a larger project to collect andrecord the communitys oral history as text. Evolvingover several years, the committee involved hundreds inthe textual and editorial process. The product was trulya book of the community, the editorial board writes(Lobo et al. 2002:xix), a reflection and documentationof the history of some of the people and significantplaces, events and activities that make up and shape thecommunity.

The use of ethnographer-consultant teams is, ofcourse, best for collaborative ethnographic projects thatinvolve large numbers of both. For example, in a recentcollaborative study of the African American communityof Muncie, Indianathe site of the famous Middle-town studies (see Lynd and Lynd 1929)entitled TheOther Side of Middletown (Lassiter et al. 2004), Hurley

Goodall, Elizabeth Campbell, Michelle Natasya Johnson,and I organized teams of community advisers and stu-dent ethnographers to work on individual chapters to-gether. As a result of ongoing conversation, the studentsand their advisers chose the topics of study and definedthe chapters trajectories. As the students finished chap-ter drafts, they took these back to their community ad-visers for comment and discussion. We embarked on thisproject with the understanding that the students com-munity advisers were not representative of the com-munity. All of us (professors, students, and consultants)were clear that each chapter team was only engaging ina discussion about Muncies African American com-munity, a discussion framed by the contours of theirparticular subject areas, their particular relationships,and their particular interests in the project. Each chaptertherefore had clear boundaries (like any conversation)but also clear potentials for in-depth dialogue about whatit meant to live in and identify with Muncies AfricanAmerican community (see Lassiter 2004a).

The students also discussed the evolving text in sev-eral larger community forums in which members of thebroader Muncie African American community publiclycommented on the developing student-adviser chapters.Such an approach, generally speaking, has been used formany years by applied anthropologists involved in com-munity-based participatory action research (see e.g.,Flocks and Monaghan 2003). Of course, community feed-back is anything but homogeneous (cf. Lackey 2003).When, for example, the National Museum of the Amer-ican Indian (NMAI) began work on a new Kiowa exhibitfor its upcoming Our Peoples Exhibition in Washing-ton, D.C., I assisted in organizing several communityforums in the Kiowa community to identify a commu-nity-based plan for the exhibit. The NMAI was buildingsimilar collaborative museum-community relationshipsall over the country and asking each participating com-munity to determine how its story would be told. Asmight be expected, Kiowa people differed strongly as towhich stories should be told and how, and community-based discussion continued for several months as NMAIstaff made return trips to gauge, through community fo-rums, this developing conversation and to present theevolving exhibit design to the Kiowa community atlarge. While consensus was anything but smooth, thesecommunity forums kept the exhibit plan in the open,encouraging participation in its concept and design (Ki-owa people wrote some of the exhibit panels, for ex-ample). These forums also encouraged Kiowa people toraise questions about how the NMAI would representKiowas to the world. Considering the number of Nativecommunities in which NMAI staff proceeded in thesame way and the scale of the eventual exhibit, this mayhave been among the largest collaborative-based projectsin the history of museums.

The final strategy for collaboration is probably themost direct in addition to being the first employed: thecreation of cowritten texts. Collaboratively written textscan take a variety of forms. Ethnographers and their in-terlocutors bring diverse skills and experience to any


given ethnographic project. While all collaborative eth-nography is arguably coauthored, not all collaborativeethnography can be cowritten (Hinson 1999). Many co-written texts follow the pattern of Severt Young Bear andR. D. Theiszs Standing in the Light: A Lakota Way ofSeeing (1994), which engages the consultant as narratorand the ethnographer as compiler and translator: Theiszrecorded Young Bears narratives and organized the ma-terial on paper, maintaining Young Bears style and de-livery as best he could, and the two edited the text to-gether as it developed. I have proceeded similarly in someof my own collaborative texts (see, e.g., Horse and Las-siter 1997), as have many other ethnographers (see, e.g.,Blackman 1992, Cruikshank et al. 1990, McBeth 1996).In other coauthored collaborative texts, consultants havehad an even more direct role in the writing of the text,contributing their own writings. In The Other Side ofMiddletown, some consultants responded to the stu-dents chapter drafts by presenting texts of their own,which the students then integrated into their chapters(see, e.g., Lassiter et al. 2004:18687). Les Field describesa slightly different process in his writing of The Grimaceof Macho Raton: Artisans, Identity, and Nation in Late-Twentieth-Century Western Nicaragua (1999), for whichhis collaborators provided essays about their experienceas artisans, which Field then integrated into his ethnog-raphy. But he diverges somewhat from other ethnogra-phers approach to coauthorship: while he does not in-volve his consultants in reading and editing the finalmanuscript, he nonetheless cautions the reader to rec-ognize how his own experiment in coauthorship isnothing if not fraught with contradictions and dangers(Field 1999:20). He elaborates (pp. 2021):

I have not individually listed these Nicaraguans ascoauthors of the book, because that would misrepre-sent how the book was written. I organized, edited,conceptualized, and wrote the vast majority of thisbook, and I claim its overall authorship. On theother hand, I have tried to navigate a blurry middleground between treating the essays written by myfriends as rich ethnographic material, with which Ican support my own points, and handling them as Iwould a text written by another academic.

Field points out that in comparison with the situationwith other collaborative projects (see, e.g., Jaffe 1996), inhis project the power differential between ethnographerand consultant is extremely lopsided (p. 21). He is anAmerican intellectual, with the power to present thelast word about Nicaraguan cultural history throughthis book, which limits the collaborative glow withwhich I want to endow it.

One can only admire Field for being so honest aboutthe nature of his collaboration, but he raises an impor-tant point: when ethnographers engage in collaborativetext production with their consultants, the power thatthey can wield over the process must not be underesti-mated. Therefore, rather than merely giving lip serviceto collaboration, ethnographers are increasingly describ-

ing the exact nature of their collaborative approach tocoauthorship when appropriate (cf. Briggs and Bauman1999:52022). While some collaborative projects can pro-ceed through relatively equitable relationships, a goodmany cannot. Indeed, collaborative coauthorship, like allstrategies in collaborative reading and editing, is not anend that can always be fully achieved.

Most collaborative ethnographers are today variouslyemploying a combination of these strategies (see Brettell1996). Every collaborative project is, of course, unique.Each calls for specific strategies appropriate to its indi-vidualized relationships and particular contexts. Co-writing of texts with consultants is not always possible,but to my mind collaborative reading and editing (es-pecially that which pushes toward cointerpretation) iswhat ultimately makes an ethnography collaborative.When taken seriously and applied systematically ratherthan bureaucratically, any one or a combination of thesestrategies leads us from the mere representation of dia-logue to its actual engagement, from one-dimensional tomultidimensional collaboration, and from a cliched col-laborative ethnography to a more deliberate and explicitcollaborative ethnography that more immediately en-gages the publics with which we work.

Conclusion

Engaging the publics with which we work in our eth-nographic research and writing necessarily casts ethnog-raphy as a public act. It also, as Marcus (1999) pointsout, casts it as an act of citizenship and activism thathas long figured prominently in various ethnographic ap-proaches (Americanist, feminist, and postmodernistamong them). The integration of collaboration into theethnographic research process engendered broader com-mitments to the people with whom we work when LewisHenry Morgan engaged Ely Parkers Iroquois communityin both research and political activism, when JamesMooney chose to act on behalf of Kiowa peyotists as aconsequence of his Kiowa research, and when Paul Radininsisted on the Blowsnakes right to tell their story theirway. The same is true of more recent feminist and post-modernist conversations about the role of dialogue andcollaboration in contemporary ethnographywhen fem-inist scholars like Judith Stacey or Lila Abu-Lughodstruggle to realize a feminist ethnography as one thatmore fully embraces other visions of gender identity,even when those visions differ from the ethnographers,and when postmodernist ethnographers such as Paul Ra-binow embrace collaborative research projects that re-alize their consultants visions for developing innovativeunderstandings of themselves, their organizations, ortheir communities. But it is only recently that collabo-rative ethnographywhich encourages collaboration inboth research and writinghas begun to move more sys-tematically from the fields margins to its center.

Collaborative ethnographic practice is now convergingwith an engaged, public anthropology, and an importantcomponent of this emergent public anthropology is writ-


ing for publics beyond the boundaries of anthropologicaldiscourse. This may be among our biggest challenges ifwe want to speak more powerfully to public issues andconcerns (cf. Jaarsma 2002). A collaborative ethnographicpractice encourages us to address the publics with whichwe work. This collaborative, public act is, of course, often,though not always, locally based, but it is not thereforeimmaterial to a larger public anthropology discussion. Ata time when anthropologists have in their sights a rede-finition of anthropological activism within much moremultifaceted, multisited, and shifting field contexts (Mar-cus 1995), we should not forgo the opportunity that mostof us have for building a public anthropology from theground up and from the center out. Collaborative ethnog-raphy is a grassroots public anthropology that must gohand and hand with the larger project outlined by Borofsky(1999), Peacock (1997), Sanday (1998), and others. Withoutthis grassroots collaborative action, this larger public an-thropology is bound to fail. Indeed, the time is ripe for usto develop the potential for writing texts that speak evenmore directly to our consultants concernsconcerns thatare no doubt global in their interconnectedness to a widerpolitical economy but, like those of an activist or appliedanthropology (Wulff and Fiske 1987) and those of partic-ipatory action research (Kemmis and McTaggart 2000),community-based. Collaborative ethnographic practicehas the potential to pull academic and applied anthro-pology, feminist and postmodernist approaches, andAmericanist and other anthropological traditions into thesame stream, fashioning an engaged anthropology that, asPeacock (1997:14) suggests, prob[es] the deep mysteriesof the human species and the human soul and encouragesus to press outward, mobilizing our work and ourselvesto make a difference beyond the discipline and theacademy.

Comments

samuel r . cookDepartment of Interdisciplinary Studies, VirginiaPolytechnic Institute, Blacksburg, VA 24061, U.S.A.([email protected]) 10 ix 04

Too often in anthropology we profess to learn from themistakes of our pastour professions colonial legacy, ourhierarchically situated interpretations of human evolu-tion and experience, and so forthbut inadequately ac-knowledge the contributions of our predecessors. Foun-dational anthropologists such as Lewis Henry Morgan,James Mooney, and even Franz Boas in some cases becomethe whipping boys of the discipline, whose theoreticaltrajectory is regarded as a lesson in how not to conductethnography. Lassiter reminds us that our history is ourstrengththat our roots are utilitarian and publiclyrelevant.

If Morgans theory of unilineal cultural evolution ringsethnocentric

Lassiter 2005

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